Thursday, February 14, 2008

Tony's Midterm Project

As I said in class tonight I want to do my project based on the band Coheed and Cambria. THe lead singer of the band is also the author of the comic book series The Armory Wars which the albums of the band are based on. A few years ago they released a graphic novel and album entitled 'Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness'. From what I've gathered from different websites (I'm going to purchase the book tomorrow probably) this is an extremely complex science fiction story where the beginning of the story is through the writer's view and where he kills off characters due to visions he has from his ten speed bicycle so that the protagonist does not have to endure the tragedies that the writer has had in real life. The entire series seems to be complicated and a few people pointed out that there is also a side project band that shows stories from different characters views. But luckily I have a good friend and many fan sites which can give me some background on the characters since this is well into the series.

Anyways, my thought for my midterm project would be to analyze how the two different techniques used by one author can alter how the exact same story is told and subsequently viewed by the audience. In one technique writing and illustrations are used and in the other words are still used but there needs to be a sense of poetry about them so that they work in a song. Also tone in voice can be used as well as the tempo, tone and instruments involved in the music. I think of this as similar to someone taking a book and turning it into a movie or play but in this case its the same person using two techniques to tell his story. Where in most cases it seems that the story changes somewhat between book and movie because a different person is making that transition, in this case that's not of concern.

5 comments:

I'm not that familiar with Coheed making a graphic novel, though I've been to one of their concerts.

Anyway, I remember reading and thinking about this question a lot a few years back, when I watched an excessive amounts of movies. What I read and eventually excepted was that each medium has its own properties. From the beginning of class we've referred to the definition of technology being technique. I think talking about how the story can be told in different media even with the same author.

Tony and I talked about this some; I wanted to repeat my main comment in case it generates further conversation. On the one hand, it _is_ interesting to talk about the properties of different media (I like Sean's phrase); one thing I'm very interested in, and will be talking about in a couple weeks, is the ways that time is handled in radically different ways in different media.

But there's another issue here: this is someone who is choosing to work in two different media at once. It's one thing to have a great book, then have a some producer decide it would make a profitable movie; it's quite another to have someone deliberately juggling multiple media. Presumably he's doing this precisely because he gets more out of working in two media rather than one.

So different properties doesn't necessarily tell the whole story; we can presumably talk about properties which emerge not only from individual media but from the _sum_ of the media used.

I just went to Phantom of the Attic yesterday and eventhough they did not have the graphic novel (which I found online..hopefully it will arrive soon) I picked up issues 4 and 5 of amory wars. I think the 5th one just came out...he was surprised when he found it...it was awesome.

Regarding that mini-story concept...my initial thoughts on the paper is have 15 parts of the paper since the album has 15 tracks. Throughout the parts I am going to give my opinion on why Claudio is using these two mediums together and how the story does not exist fully in just one of the medium on their own as the story and album unfold.